Fall 2006 Seminar Series

DATE: Thursday, September 28, 2006
LOCATION: E40-298
TIME: 4:15pm
Reception immediately following in the Philip M. Morse Reading Room, E40-106

SPEAKER:
Vijay Vazirani

TITLE
New Market Models and Algorithms

ABSTRACT
The notion of a “market” has undergone a paradigm shift with the Internet -- totally new and highly successful markets have been defined and launched by companies such as Google, Yahoo!, Amazon, MSN and eBay. Another major change is the availability of massive computational power for running these markets in a centralized or distributed manner.

 

In view of these new realities, the study of market equilibria, an important, though essentially non-algorithmic, theory within Mathematical Economics, needs to be revived and rejuvenated with an inherently algorithmic approach. Such a theory should not only address traditional market models but also define new models for some of the new markets.

 

In this two-talk series, I will give a feel for the exciting work going on on this front. Interestingly enough, this work has also contributed handsomely to the theory of algorithms itself. In particular, the highly successful primal-dual schema from exact and approximation algorithms, which was so far used for combinatorially solving special classes of linear programs, has been extended to solving nonlinear convex programs.